Middle Spoon
A Novel
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Middle Spoon
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Alejandro Varela
About this listen
One of TODAY’s 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025
A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela
The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.
With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon reveals the rawness of infatuation while reimagining what relationships, marriage, and family life can look like. Alejandro Varela boldly probes the corners of society in desperate need of change—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on the tangled dynamics that shape our lives. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.
©2025 Alejandro Varela (P)2025 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
“Nothing gets away from Alejandro Varela; every thought and detail, emotion and memory is taken apart to the atoms. The result is obsessive, explosive, heartbreaking, funny, and brilliant. Middle Spoon subverts the ordinary novel with intelligence and vulnerability, and with its arias of love and choruses of doubt, Varela has made a sly, analytical opera of the heart.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
“What a rollicking delight! In capturing the pain of heartbreak through the lens of a neurotic narrator, Alejandro Varela asks provocative questions about the shape of family and the nature of love. Not only does he pull all that off, but he does it in the epistolary form while digressing into political theory, quantum entanglement, and gay nightlife; and proving frequently hilarious. A triple-axel of a novel.”—Ada Calhoun, New York Times-bestselling author of Crush